I sat down this morning and randomly thumbed through the pages of my Bible, stopping and reading the first few verses that my finger landed on. The is where my finger landed.

I thought this fit with my post “It’s In Our Hearts” which is about Deuteronomy 30:11-14, especially verse 14 which reads:

The word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart so that you can do it.

What I wanted to write about from these verses from Psalms is verse 4:

Delight yourself in the Lord,

and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Some could read this and misconstrue the meaning. They would say “I delight in the Lord and yet I didn’t receive my heart’s desire. I live in a crappy house, drive a crappy car and work at a crappy job to pay for my crappy life.”

Those are desires of the mind. Those are desires fed into our minds by the relentless marketing of the world and by our nature to covet. They are not desires of the heart.

What does the heart want? To me it’s pretty basic. The heart wants to be happy. It wants to be content. The heart wants to eat, drink and be happy in its toil.

Outside influences tell us that other things, things of vanity, things that don’t last, that’s what will make us happy. When that one worldly thing stops making us happy just throw it away and go get another thing of vanity that will make you happy. That’s why you work, right?

Happiness and contentment aren’t found in disposable items. That is what David is saying in the second verse of Psalms 37.

For they will soon fade like the grass

and wither like the green herb.

We fill our minds with desires of the world and work our entire lives chasing a better life or what we are being told is a better life. We are never satisfied because someone has more.

As we chase and collect these worldly desires, things that we believe will make us happy, we fill up the space in our heart with this clutter and crowd out the space where our true desires lie. We must take the time to remove this clutter and make the room in our hearts for God.

I image in ancient times it wasn’t quite as hard as today to keep the clutter out. You certainly weren’t deluged by the constant bombardment of marketing, telling you to buy this, get that, and all your desires will be fulfilled. You probably didn’t have much time to sit around and wish for these worldly things, not when you were dependent solely upon yourself for the survival of you and your family.

You never knew that Sam over the hill had invented a better plow or found a better use for manure. And you certainly weren’t concerned about what sneakers everyone was paying a week’s salary to own.

Today we must guard our hearts as everyone wants to pull at it and use it for their own covetousness.

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2 thoughts on “Find Your Heart’s Desire”

Beautiful shared wake-up call and reminder of what matters most. This morning a friend and I were sharing on what it means to take delight in the Lord and focus on the essence of the heart’s desires for His glory. A liberating post; thank you, and praise God